"AGM members lunch." Ethos: Official Publication of the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory, (198), pp. 13.

Much can be learned from burgeoning climate action movements in thousands of majority world rural communities. Land degradation has increased the vulnerability of over three billion people to famine, food insecurity, water shortages, and increasingly severe weather events, trapping climate-vulnerable communities in vicious cycles of impoverishment. Yet, many communities are learning through local climate action how to escape these cycles. We offer the case of Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) as one example to understand the conditions under which impoverished rural communities (...) address ecological degradation. Combining simple reforestation action with a community engagement approach enables farming households using FMNR to regreen their landscapes, increase food security, reduce poverty, increase resilience to climate change and transform rural development. Communities in at least 29 countries are practising FMNR, reforesting tens of millions of hectares of land, strengthening communities, and restoring landscapes. Synergies between FMNR and faith-based moral principles help boost its embrace. Across the majority world, moral imagination and reasoning help motivate emotions that sustain farmers’ local action through their hope of a better future and scale up globally important community-based agricultural movements. Such collective action movements harness synergies between climate justice, poverty reduction, and human flourishing. (shrink)

How well the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are achieved will greatly influence the lives of today’s children and decisively shape the rest of the 21st century. Yet, children were largely excluded from opportunities to influence the selection of SDGs and their associated targets and indicators, and major barriers to meaningful child engagement remain. However, child-focused agencies have found that when children are intentionally enabled to participate in seeking accountability, they can influence their families, communities and governments to value their contributions (...) and increase their well-being. In furthering its strategy of building brighter futures for children, World Vision implements Citizen Voice and Action (CV&A), a strategic social accountability approach, into communities where children are severely impoverished. Drawing on empirical evidence from children’s CV&A experiences, this paper enquires into the circumstances under which children are empowered to seek accountability for SDGs. This article identifies shared processes which they and others use to strengthen children’s participation in seeking social justice through social accountability. This paper argues that children possess under-recognised research capabilities to think and reflect systemically, critique, understand, and pursue socially just and equitable outcomes conducive to the SDGs, which under the right circumstances, can influence practices, policies, laws and systems. (shrink)

In High Schools, Race, and America’s Future, Lawrence Blum offers a lively account of a rigorous high school course on race and racism. Set in a racially, ethnically, and economically diverse high school, the book chronicles students’ engagement with one another, with a rich and challenging academic curriculum, and with questions that relate powerfully to their daily lives. Blum, an acclaimed moral philosopher whose work focuses on issues of race, reflects with candor, insight, and humor on the challenges and surprises (...) encountered in teaching—the unexpected turns in conversation, the refreshing directness of students’ questions, the “aha” moments and the awkward ones, and the paradoxes of his own role as a white college professor teaching in a multiracial high school classroom. High Schools, Race, and America’s Future provides an invaluable resource for those who want to teach students to think deeply and talk productively about race. (shrink)

Reviews: Graeme Smith, Singing Australian: A History of Folk and Country Music ; Bill C. Malone, Don't Get Above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political ChangeWilliam WalkerProfessional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change, by Stanley Fish; xi & 146 pp. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, $22.00 paper.Our greatest living Miltonist, Professor Fish, continues to address the most hotly contested issues of the profession of literary criticism in prose which, if perhaps not quite the best in Anglo-American literary studies as he once judged it to be, is certainly (...) distinguished by coherence, power, and wit. In this version of material he presented in a workshop at the Folger Library in 1990 and as the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford University in 1993, Fish analyzes the relationship between literary criticism and political change. By literary criticism, he means the activity of determining what a literary text means. According to Fish, while in the eighteenth century just about any kind of commentary on literature counted as literary criticism, the determination of the meaning of literature is the essential job of literary criticism in the twentieth century. By political change, Fish means changes in things such as the way governments spend money, treat their citizens and foreign governments, establish the civil law, and appoint people to office. The major claim of the book is that doing literary criticism in the United States today rarely causes political change. The counsel he offers to all those literary critics who want to bring about political change through their literary work is thus to find a new job: “if you want to send a message that will be heard beyond the academy, get out of it” (p. 2).But why can’t observing that Lycidas means that Milton is afraid of women help to overthrow patriarchy and the legal/cultural system which continues to perpetuate it? Because, Fish claims, “there are, at present, no well-established routes by which literary criticism is first brought to the attention of those who inhabit the centers of power and then presented to them in a way that ties it to their concerns” (p. 52). That is to say that it is because American society is structured in a particular way that literary interpretive acts are politically inconsequential. Though he does not provide much evidence for this big claim about the structure of American society and its relation to literary criticism, Fish does support it by asking us to see the absurdity of imagining otherwise: “think about it. You are about to open a new business or introduce a bill in Congress or initiate an advertising campaign, but you pause to ask yourself, ‘What would the readers of Diacritics say?’” (p. 91). This is not to say that the segregation of literary work from political work is a given of the human condition. Fish cites Renaissance England and contemporary Israel as cases of societies structured in such a way that literary acts have immediate and important political consequences (though literary acts and political acts in these societies are still clearly distinct because their purposes are still different). The point is just that, because American society is currently structured as it is, the activity of identifying the meaning of works of literature is rarely [End Page 544] relevant to political change. The point holds even when one shifts the center of literary work from determining the meaning of literature to (i) observing how literature and the act of professing it are deeply implicated in society-wide structures of power and legitimization, or (ii) observing and “transcending” the boundaries between literary criticism and other disciplines. That is to say that even if one were to transform literary criticism in the way new historicists and several proponents of cultural studies whom Fish cites propose, work in this discipline would still rarely cause significant political change. For the contingent fact is that, regardless of what academics do, think they do, and intend to do, “no one cares very much about literary criticism outside the confines of its professional practice” (p. 55).But if literary criticism cannot, at least for the moment in the U.S., do significant political work, and if, as Fish also claims, it cannot do significant moral, cultural work (making people better, preserving the best that is said... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Bill Brandt: A LifeStuart Richmond, Professor of Arts EducationBill Brandt: A Life, by Paul Delany. Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 2004, 335 pp., $47.50 hardcover.From June to September 2003, Britain's famous art gallery, the Tate Modern, housed dramatically in a gigantic, renovated power station on the south bank of the Thames, held its first major photography exhibition, entitled Cruel and Tender after comments made by a critic (...) to describe the work of Walker Evans. The twenty-three artists in the show, including August Sander, Diane Arbus, Rineke Dijkkstra, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, and Thomas Ruff, were mainly Americans and Germans. Bill Brandt, who had a reputation as a documentary photographer, was not included. Writing in the catalogue, Tate director Nicholas Serota notes, "Cruel and Tender examines a form of documentary photography that keeps within the limits of the medium, stressing pure description.... Surrealist and Conceptual photography would fit more naturally into the programs and displays at the Tate, but the elusive and documentary qualities in straight photography challenge the traditions of the institution, by concentrating on a form of photography which explores the intrinsic aspects of the medium." In other words, "straight photography" serves as a kind of unemotional, uncreative narrative of ordinary life, avoiding drama, romanticism, sentimentality, deep coding, and, as far as possible, the expressive contributions of the artist. The relationship of photograph to reality, though problematic, is still interesting, according to the catalogue notes, and this contemporary work aims to inform us, literally, of the true essence, banal or otherwise, of our world. This approach acts implicitly to undermine the fake optimism of consumer capitalism.It will be useful to keep in mind this exhibition in considering the work of Brandt, for in the early 1980s Brandt was being lauded as Britain's greatest photographer, and he was nothing if not expressive. It was his métier to find the unusual in the everyday and to create meaning through careful staging and composition, drawing very much on his own personal outlook, aesthetic philosophy, and psychology. He believed all was permitted in photography, whether in the novel choice of lens, use of friends as models, or darkroom processing to achieve his vision. Rather than being a documentary photographer, at least in the purist sense of the Tate collection, he was more the poet ethnographer with a strong sense of the surreal. His was a vision that would be imposed on the world. After reading Paul Delany's excellent biography, it becomes clear why Brandt, all too soon, had become unfashionable in the eyes of the Tate organizers and contemporary photography at large. He is, nevertheless, an artist who can help us question the nature of reality while producing work that is often very complex and beautiful, and someone whose methods and ideas can serve as [End Page 118] a model of individual creative practice. The global interest in photography, the many significant exhibitions and books produced in the past decade, and the prices paid for photographs have by now lain to rest the old debate about whether photography is a genuine art form. As any serious photographer can attest, producing a photograph that has form, presence, and originality is dauntingly difficult, even though photography seems so easy. Everyone, today, has a camera. Yet, constantly fed with glitzy images from commerce and entertainment that direct our minds along certain well-worn grooves—a challenge for aesthetic education—budding artists require a certain strength of character and imagination to resist the literal and obvious and move toward a more authentic way of seeing. Delany's book shows how someone can defy fashion, as Brandt did for half a century, producing "pictorial" images layered with meaning and mystery. As an aside, despite the intent to show images that simply describe the world, some of the Tate pictures still manage, to my eye at least, to have their own ephemeral expressiveness, and at times great beauty, which raises the question, At what point does a document become a work of art? The Tate approach, with its strict theories, seems to be more interested in legislating than in exploring photographic practice.Biographies can... (shrink)

Published in 1982, Carol Gilligan's _In a Different Voice_ proposed a new model of moral reasoning based on care, arguing that it better described the moral life of women. ____An Ethic of Care__ is the first volume to bring together key contributions to the extensive debate engaging Gilligan's work. It provides the highlights of the often impassioned discussion of the ethic of care, drawing on the literature of the wide range of disciplines that have entered into the debate. _Contributors:_ Annette (...) Baier, Diana Baumrind, Lawrence A. Blum, Mary Brabeck, John Broughton, Owen Flanagan, Marilyn Friedman, Carol Gilligan, Catherine G. Greeno, Catherine Jackson, Linda K. Kerber, Mary Jeanne Larrabee, Zella Luria, Eleanor E. Maccoby, Linda Nicholson, Bill Puka, Carol B. Stack, Joan C. Tronto, Lawrence Walker, Gertrud Nunner-Winkler. (shrink)

It is close to current orthodoxy that perceptual experience is to be characterized, at least in part, by its representational content, roughly, by the way it represents things as being in the world around the perceiver. Call this basic idea the content view.

According to Wringe 2006 we have good reasons for accepting the existence of Global Collective Obligations - in other words, collective obligations which fall on the world’s population as a whole. One such reason is that the existence of such obligations provides a plausible solution a problem which is sometimes thought to arise if we think that individuals have a right to have their basic needs satisfied. However, obligations of this sort would be of little interest – either theoretical or (...) practical – if they did not give rise, either directly or indirectly, to any kinds of reasons for individuals to behave in certain ways. -/- In this paper, I shall argue that in many situations, forward-looking global obligations give rise to an obligation on individuals to work towards bringing into existence and support an institutional system which will enable their obligations to be met. My argument for this conclusion involves two steps. In the first step, I address a general question about how collective obligations can give rise to individual obligations without being reducible to them, and which obligations they give rise to. Here I give a Kant-inspired argument, based on the principles that ‘ought implies can’ and that the content of the moral law is given by reflecting on how agents should legislate in a kingdom of ends, which is designed to show that collective obligations can give rise to individual obligations. In the second step I apply this principle to the case of global forward-looking obligations. (shrink)

In the recent neuroethics literature, there has been vigorous debate concerning the ethical implications of the use of neurotechnologies that may alter a person’s identity. Much of this debate has been framed around the concept of authenticity. The argument of this chapter is that the ethics of authenticity, as applied to neurotechnological treatment or enhancement, is conceptually misleading. The notion of authenticity is ambiguous between two distinct and conflicting conceptions: self-discovery and self-creation. The self-discovery conception of authenticity is based on (...) a problematic conception of a static, real inner self. The notion of self-creation, although more plausible, blurs the distinction between identity and autonomy. Moreover, both conceptions are overly individualistic and fail sufficiently to account for the relational constitution of personal identity. The authors propose that a relational, narrative understanding of identity and autonomy can incorporate the more plausible aspects of both interpretations of authenticity, while providing a normatively more illuminating theoretical framework for approaching the question of whether and how neurotechnologies threaten identity. (shrink)

The standard paradigm for mental causation is a person’s acting for a reason. Something happens - she intentionally φ’s - the occurrence of which we explain by citing a relevant belief or desire. In the present context, I simply take for granted the following two conditions on the appropriateness of this explanation. First, the agent φ’s _because_ she believes/desires what we say she does, where this is expressive of a _causal_ dependence.1 Second, her believing/desiring this gives her a _reason_ for (...) φ-ing: recognizing that she has this belief/desire makes her φ-ing intelligible as rational in the light of her other attitudes and circumstances. A further condition must be met, though, if this is to be a genuine psychological explanation, a case of her acting _for_ the reason in question. Consider the following example of Davidson’s (1973, p. 79). An exhausted climber is desperate to rid herself of the weight and danger of holding her partner on a rope; and her sudden realization that simply letting go would achieve this so unnerves her that her grip loosens slightly and he falls. Her releasing him causally depends upon her having this belief and desire, which provide _a_ reason for doing what she does. But this is not _why_ she does it: it would be at best misleading to say that she dropped him, intentionally, because she was fed up with holding his weight, or because she thought that she might otherwise fall. Her letting go does not depend upon her having these reasons in the right way. The reason-giving relation is causally irrelevant. If we are to explain a person’s acting _for_ a reason, then her doing. (shrink)

When Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then head of the IMF, was arrested on charges of sexual assault arising from events that were alleged to have occurred during his stay in an up-market hotel in New York, a sizeable portion of French public opinion was outraged - not by the possibility that a well-connected and widely-admired politician had assaulted an immigrant hotel worker, but by the way in which the accused had been treated by the American authorities. I shall argue that in one (...) relatively minor respect, Strauss-Kahn’s defenders were correct. They were correct to argue that the parading of Strauss-Kahn before the press, in handcuffs - the so-called perp walk - constituted a form of punishment; and thus that it contravened the principle that criminal punishments should only be administered after a fair trial. So-called ‘expressive’ theorists of punishment hold that a form of harsh treatment can only constitute a form of punishment if it has an expressive role. Within the expressive family, we can distinguish between views on which the primary target of the communication to be the society of which either offender, or victim, or both are members—what I call ‘Denunciatory Views’, and views which take the principle target of penal communication to be the offender—such as Antony Duff’s Communicative View. I shall argue that on both a minimal account of punishment and on either kind of expressive view, ‘perp walks’ are a form of punishment. (shrink)

In his comments, Richard Fumerton carefully develops two fundamental concerns with my views, which he interprets sympathetically, and almost entirely correctly. Before turning to these concerns, though, I must make one point about his concise opening statement of my principal claims. As I hope is clear from my précis, perceptual experiences provide reasons for empirical beliefs not simply in virtue of sharing demonstrative content with them. The key idea is that a person cannot properly grasp the objective content of these (...) experiences—that is, he cannot actually have experiences of particular things in the mind-independent world around him—without understanding that his apprehension that things are thus and so out there is in part due to the fact that they are. He therefore recognizes the relevant content as his epistemic openness to the way things objectively are. This is clearly central to my overall position. (shrink)

We believe that the ordinary physical objects that we perceive continue to exist unperceived; and this is intuitively an aspect of any authentic characterization of how the world appears to us in perception. But how can experience present its objects as continuing to exist beyond that very experience of them? Here I aim to explain this phenomenon. I start with an insight from Evans (1985). Familiar attempts to implement this insight fail, in my opinion. Here I introduce, motivate, defend, and (...) elaborate an alternative approach to its implementation that, I claim, succeeds. Its key is to recognize the role of Evans’s insight in the metaphysics of perceptual experience itself. (shrink)

The ancient Pyrrhonians skeptics suspended judgment about all philosophical views. Their main opponents were the Dogmatists—those who believed their preferred philosophical views. In Outlines of Skeptical-Dogmatism: On Disbelieving Our Philosophical Views, Mark Walker argues, contra Pyrrhonians and Dogmatists, for a "darker" skepticism: we should disbelieve our philosophical views. On the question of political morality, for example, we should disbelieve libertarianism, conservativism, socialism, liberalism, and any alternative ideologies. Since most humans have beliefs about philosophical subject matter, such as beliefs about (...) religious and political matters, humanity writ large should disbelieve their preferred philosophical views. Walker argues that Skeptical-Dogmatism permits a more realistic estimation of our epistemic powers. Dogmatists who believe their view is correct, while believing that two or more competitor views of their opponents are false, must—at least implicitly—take themselves to be “über epistemic superiors” to their disagreeing colleagues. Such a self-assessment is as implausible as it is hubristic. Skeptical-Dogmatism, in contrast, permits a more realistic and humbler epistemic self-conception. The author also shows that there are no insuperable practical difficulties in living as a Skeptical-Dogmatist. (shrink)

Just Images: Ethics and the Cinematic charts current developments within the field of ethics and the role it plays in the study of moving images. It is the first collection of essays of its kind that brings together articles by film and media scholars from three continents, and provides multiple points of engagement of film with present and past histories, politics, myth making, and with core aspects of human subjectivity. The essays cover a wide range of topics, such as the (...) European Union; Europe during World War II and after; film genres; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; early American history, and recent catastrophic events. The collection includes an introductory chapter by Thomas Elsaesser as well as chapters by Kristian Feigelson, Règine-Mihal Friedman, Nurith Gertz and Gal Hermoni, Anton Kaes, Gertrud Koch, Odeya Kohen-Raz, Lihi Nagler, Judd Ne'eman, Bill Nichols, and Janet Walker. The contributors offer different approaches to the issue of film and ethics and ask whether there are specific characteristics of the moving image, or of film scholarship, that relate to ethical issues; and how discussing the engagement of both narrative and documentary film with representations of the Other, trauma, terrorism, the Holocaust, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict may contribute to the re-shaping of past and current thoughts on these subjects. (shrink)

I consider the metaphysics of farts. I contrast the essential-bum-origin view with a phenomenological view, and I argue in favour of the latter.

Mary Kalantzis was from 2006 to 2016 Dean of the College of Education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Bill Cope is a Professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. They are co-authors of multiple books including Making Sense: Reference, Agency, and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning (Cambridge, forthcoming), New Learning: Elements of a Science of Education (Cambridge, 2008, 2012), Literacies (Cambridge 2012, 2016) and e-Learning Ecologies (2017).

The payments industry – the business of transferring value through public and corporate infrastructures – is undergoing rapid transformation. New business models and regulatory environments disrupt more traditional fee-based strategies, and new entrants seek to displace legacy players by leveraging new mobile platforms and new sources of data. In this increasingly diversified industry landscape, start-ups and established players are attempting to embed payment in ‘social’ experience through novel technologies of accounting for trust. This imagination of the social, however, is being (...) materialized in gated platforms for payment, accounting, and exchange. This paper explores the ambiguous politics of such experiments, specifically those, like Bitcoin or the on-demand sharing economy, that delineate an economic imaginary of ‘just us’ – a closed and closely guarded community of peers operating under the illusion that there are no mediating institutions undergirding that community. This provokes questions about the intersection of payment and publics. Payment innovators’ attenuated understanding of the social may, we suggest, evacuate the nitty-gritty of politics. (shrink)

Understood in their historical context, current debates about psychiatric classification, prompted by the publication of the DSM-5, open up new opportunities for improved translational research in psychiatry. In this paper, we draw lessons for translational research from three time slices of 20th century psychiatry. From the first time slice, 1913 and the publication of Jaspers’ General Psychopathology, the lesson is that translational research in psychiatry requires a pluralistic approach encompassing equally the sciences of mind (including the social sciences) and of (...) brain. From the second time slice, 1953 and a conference in New York from which our present symptom-based classifications are derived, the lesson is that, while reliability remains the basis of psychiatry as an observational science, validity too is essential to effective translation. From the third time slice, 1997 and a conference on psychiatric classification in Dallas that brought together patients and carers with researchers and clinicians, the lesson is that we need to build further on collaborative models of research combining expertise-by-training with expertise-by-experience. This is important if we are to meet the specific challenges to translation presented by the complexity of the concept of mental disorder, particularly as reflected in the diversity of desired treatment outcomes. Taken together, these three lessons – a pluralistic approach, reliability and validity, and closer collaboration – provide an emerging framework for more effective translation of research into practice in 21st century psychiatry. (shrink)

In this article I start with Marx's transcriptions of Spinoza, and the deep significance of what he transcribed, from the Theologico-Political Treatise and the Correspondence, and in what order. I contend that this demonstrates what was of particular interest and importance to him at that time. Second, I examine the presence, even if not explicit, of Spinoza in Marx's works, and turn to the question whether Marx was a Spinozist. I think he was. Third, I turn to Ilyenkov and his (...) engagement with Spinoza, and fourth, to Ilyenkov's place in the Marxist tradition of Spinozism. Fifth and sixth, I present an analysis of Ilyenkov's instrumental deployment of Spinoza first in his Dialectical Logic and then in his The Dialectic of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx's Capital. (shrink)

In this paper, I employ the pioneering works of Nussbaum, Sen, Saito, and Walker, in conjunction with the U.S. tradition of academic freedom, to outline a capability-centered vision of undergraduate education. Pace Nussbaum and Walker, I propose a short list of learning capabilities to which every undergraduate student should be entitled. This working definition of undergraduate education offers a starting point for discussion and experimentation. I employ it here to engage the current controversy in U.S. colleges and universities (...) over the nature, value, and legitimacy of undergraduate students’ academic freedoms. In contrast to the anti-indoctrination emphasis of David Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights, I argue that students’ academic freedoms can be more effectively secured through the articulation of “essential freedoms for liberal learning” whose principal focus is not the behavior or political affiliations of teachers but the intellectual needs and circumstances of students. (shrink)

Nitrous oxide is a gas at room temperature and pressure. It is used primarily for anesthesia but is also used as a propellant for whipped cream or to boost octane levels in racing cars. N2O was extensively studied by Sir Humphrey Davy, who presented a detailed description of his subjective experiences under the influence of N2O, as well as self-reports by friends and colleagues of their own experiences while inhaling the gas. Sir Davy's treatise was a thorough, systematic, and extensive (...) characterization of N2O and was a foreshadowing of two centuries of research to follow. Sir Davy's and subsequent research consisted of the dose-response assessment of subjective effects of acute and repeated N2O administration, examination of individual differences, and the study of environmental and organismic determinants/modulators of N2O effects. This chapter presents the results of such experiments in a chronological framework and attempts to detail the various characterizations of N2O across the years since its discovery. (shrink)

Normal perception involves conscious experience of the world. What I call the Content View, (CV), attempts to account for this in terms of the representational content of perception (Brewer, 2011, esp. ch. 4). I offer a new argument here against this view. Ascription of personal level content, either conceptual or nonconceptual, depends on the idea that determinate predicational information is conveyed to the subject. This determinate predication depends upon the exercise of certain personal level capacities for categorization and discrimination. Exercise (...) of such personal level capacities depends in turn upon conscious selective attention. Yet conscious visual acquaintance with the world is the prior ground for the possibility of any such conscious selective attention. Acquaintance obtains throughout the visual field: where conscious attention is not actually directed as well as where it is. So acquaintance does not depend upon conscious selective attention. Thus, acquaintance is not sufficient for the exercise of the relevant personal level capacities. Exercise of these capacities is nevertheless necessary for personal level content. Therefore visual acquaintance cannot be understood in terms of perceptual content: basic conscious experience of the world is not a matter of anything like the predication involved in perceptual content. It is rather the relational ground for the possibility of such predication. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 341-362 [Access article in PDF] Virgin Father and Prodigal Son Stephen Brockmann I IN BOTH THE UNITED STATES and Germany—as well as in much of the rest of the Western world—the baby-boom generation now holds a controlling position in politics, economics, and culture. The election of Bill Clinton (born in 1946) to the Presidency signaled the generational shift in the United States as (...) early as 1992, and that shift was confirmed by the election campaign of 2000, in which both candidates, Al Gore (born in 1948) and George W. Bush (born in 1946), in spite of their differences, represented the same generation. In Germany the political shift in generations did not occur until 1998, when Gerhard Schröder (born slightly before the beginning of the German baby boom, in 1944) defeated Helmut Kohl (born in 1930).Significantly, Kohl is a member of the generation of Germans born during the 1930s and reared during the years of the Third Reich but too young to have played any significant role, either negative or positive, during the Nazi era. No member of this generation born in the 1930s ever became President in the United States, where the generation of World War Two veterans dominated national politics from Eisenhower to George Herbert Walker Bush. However what in America is a "silent generation" has been, in Germany, the generation most closely identified with the success of the Federal Republic of Germany: these were the so-called Flakhelfer (antiaircraft helpers) who had been children during the war. Kohl therefore famously referred to them as having the "grace of late birth," meaning that they, unlike the war veterans, were presumably untouched by any form of collective guilt for Nazi crimes against humanity. Whereas in the United States the Presidency was transferred directly from the World War Two veterans to [End Page 341] baby boomers—and in the case of the two Bush presidencies, literally, albeit indirectly, from father to son—in Germany the transition from the World War Two veterans (particularly former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt) to the baby boomers was interrupted by a long period of domination by the in-between generation of Flakhelfer.In both countries the baby-boom generation represents a significant shift in sensibilities and encompasses the generation involved in student protest and oppositional social movements in the 1960s and 1970s. In the United States these included the anti-Vietnam War movement, the feminist and gay-rights movements, the sexual revolution, the civil-rights movement, and the ecological movement, as well as, on the extreme fringes, terrorist groupings such as the Weather Underground and a great many religious sects and cults. In Germany the baby boomers formed many parallel groups and movements, including antiwar, feminist, ecological, and gay segments, as well as a proliferation of sectarian Marxist political groupings (so-called K-Gruppen, with the "K" meaning "Kommunist"). In the United States, Bill Clinton was an antiwar protester in the 1960s and 1970s, while both Gerhard Schröder and his Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer (born in 1948) had participated in left-wing political movements during the same period.In both West Germany and the United States the heyday of protest movements in the 1960s and 1970s signaled a generational split, with younger people—the very generation that is now in power in the two countries—accusing their elders of Machiavellian cynicism, imperialism, patriarchy, and worse. Such accusations can be recalled by the formerly popular slogans "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" in the United States and "Unter den Talaren der Muff von tausend Jahren" ("under the academic regalia the stench of a thousand years") in Germany. The latter slogan was a reference not just to a generalized stodginess on the part of elderly German academics but to Hitler's invocation of a "Thousand-Year Reich;" German students were none-too-subtly suggesting that many of their professors had once been Nazis.The difference in these two slogans—one referring to past and the other to present sins—corresponds to a major distinction between the two baby... (shrink)

Philosophical Issues, Volume 30, Issue 1, Page 24-38, October 2020.

Some metaphysical disjunctivists about conscious perceptual experience argue that their position has attractive, anti-sceptical, epistemological consequences. Perceiving a particular round red ball is a matter of being in a conscious condition, which serves as the ground for judgement that that thing is round and red, that is inconsistent with the falsity of that judgement. For it consists in a relation of acquaintance with that very thing and its shape and colour. Hence the ground for judgement suffices for its truth in (...) a way that contributes to understanding the status of the judgement as knowledgeable. Here I explore an analogous way in which it might be argued that the metaphysics of conscious perception may have epistemological benefits. This concerns, not the fact that such experience consists in the relational presentation of particular worldly objects and their perceptible properties, but the fact that it consists in their presentation from a particular point of view. This is what enables perception of those particular worldly things, rather than any others, and makes sense of their continued existence unperceived. For this point of view may evidently change, independently of the existence and nature of what is presented on any specific occasion, leaving those very things as they are, although now unperceived. (shrink)

The research project described in this report represents one of the most extensive studies of character education ever undertaken, including over 10,000 students and 255 teachers in schools across England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. Research techniques consisted of a mixture of surveys, moral dilemmas and semi-structured interviews. This report explores: - The current situation in character education, both in the UK and internationally - How developed British students are with respect to moral character and the extent to which they (...) are able to understand and apply moral virtues, especially those aged 14 and 15 - How teachers in the UK understand their role in terms of students’ moral and character development - What helps or hinders the development of children’s characters according to teachers in UK schools. (shrink)

We make how a person acts intelligible by revealing it as rational in the light of what she perceives, thinks, wants and so on. For example, we might explain that she reached out and picked up a glass because she was thirsty and saw that it contained water. In doing this, we are giving a causal explanation of her behaviour in terms of her antecedent beliefs, desires and other attitudes. Her wanting a drink and realizing that the glass contained one (...) caused her reaching out and grasping for it. This tells us how the action came about and makes sense of why it happened. At least, something broadly along these lines strikes me as a fairly crude and partial regimentation of our pretheoretic understanding of everyday action explanation. (shrink)

Ambivalence—where we experience two conflicting emotional responses to the same object, person or state of affairs—is sometimes thought to pose a problem for cognitive theories of emotion. Drawing on the ideas of the Stoic Chrysippus, I argue that a cognitivist can account for ambivalence without retreating from the view that emotions involve fully-fledged evaluative judgments. It is central to the account I offer that emotions involve two kinds of judgment: one about the object of emotion, and one about the subject's (...) response. (shrink)

Rachel Loewen Walker's original study of Deleuze's theory of temporality critically expands our understanding of non-linear time through engagement with queer theory and new feminist materialisms. Walker draws on the notion of non-linear time in Deleuze's work to advance a conception of 'the living present' as a critical juncture through which new meanings and activism in the fields of feminism, environment, and queerness may be realised. Using literary texts by Jeanette Winterson, and philosophical texts by Julia Kristeva and (...) Luce Irigaray, Walker reflects on monomythic stories about gender, sexuality, and identity in the context of rapid climate change, and posthumanist politics to tread new ground for Deleuzian studies of time. Speaking to and from feminist, queer, environmental, trans, and crip political movements, Walker uses Deleuze to argue for a 'lived present' which is both mutable and embodied. Such characteristics are presented as essential components in the construction of meaning that is not bound by a static present, past or future. Queer and Deleuzian Temporalities pinpoints the importance of feminist and queer theory to a critical re-evaluation of time. Through a wide-ranging analysis we are able to see how everyone is embedded within rather than outside of time, opening up the possibility for imagining and realising alternate futures both for ourselves and the environment. (shrink)

In this paper I attempt to show how an appeal to a particular kind of collective obligation - a collective obligation falling on an unstructured collective consisting of the world’s population as a whole – can be used to undermine recently influential objections to the idea that there is a human right to health which have been put forward by Gopal Sreenivasan and Onora O’Neill. -/- I take this result to be significant both for its own sake and because it (...) helps to answer a challenge often put to Those who argue for the existence of collective obligations: namely, to explain why the question of whether there are any such obligations might matter from a practical point of view. One way of introducing the objection is to focus on questions of agency. Here I'll argue both that there can be obligations on groups that are not themselves collective agents, and that these can play an important explanatory and clarifcatory role in accounting for obligations which fall on individuals. (shrink)